A man needs a maid

..sang Neil Young although I doubt he had in mind the route that many a young woman took in years gone by in entering the service of families with the means to employ them. This is the maid's room at the the very top of the house in Pittville Terrace, Cheltenham which was the birthplace of the celebrated English composer Gustav Holst. No Downton Abbey this with its team of servants. The Holsts employed just two servants - a maid-of-all-work and a nursemaid for Gustav and his brother Emil. The house is now a museum furnished and decorated to resemble as closely as possible how it would have looked when Holst was born in 1874. The extra is of the drawing room which is a much more spacious and better appointed room than the tiny spartan space assigned to the maid. The volunteers in attendance today were a mine of information and very helpful. Well worth a visit. After visiting the museum we met up with H & L for lunch at Woodkraft (highly recommended) and then went to our first two gigs in the Big Top marquee at the Festival. The first was the Jazz Soul Summit with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Guy Barker Big Band and an array of vocalists including Emili Sande, Curtis Stigers (who did an excellent cover of Paul Simon's 'An American Tune'), Lisa Stansfield, Lulu (who ended with the marvellous 'To Sir with Love') and, astonishingly, the actor Damien Lewis (last seen playing the capricious and murderously insecure King Henry Vlll in the BBC adaptation of WolfHall), who turns out to be a fantastic singer treating us to a superb version of Al Green's 'Take me to the River'. The concert is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 2 sometime in July and is not to be missed. The second gig was Lisa Stansfield and her band - an excellent set that had loads of the audience bopping in the aisles.